The long-awaited premiere of Ridley Scott’s and Kevin Macdonald’s ‘Life In A Day’ YouTube documentary is finally here. The film premiers tonight at the Sundance Film Festival and, for those of you who didn’t make it to the festival, you can watch the premiere from home as well. YouTube will be live-streaming the film live tonight on the Life In A Day YouTube channel at 8PM ET.
Keep in mind that tonight’s premiere will be your only chance to watch the film for the next six months, before it makes it’s theatrical premiere on Jul 24, 2011. National Geographic Films has picked up the documentary and has chosen to premiere it exactly one year after the footage was shot. However, the submissions gallery is still available on YouTube if you want to get your ‘Life In A Day’ fix before the film hits theaters.

Tonight’s premiere will be followed by a life Q&A session with Kevin Macdonald as well as other key contributors to the film. You can submit questions for the Q&A here via Google Moderator. Questions must be submitted by tonight at 10:15PM ET.

If you aren’t in the United States then you can check the screening times on the Life In A Day channel. Just click on ‘View Screening Times’ at the top right of the page and you can browse screening times according to alphabetized countries. If you’re screening time is in the middle of the night, don’t despair. According to the YouTube blog, “If you’re outside of the United States, you can catch a rebroadcast on Friday, January 28, at 7pm in your local time zone, captioned and subtitles in 25 additional languages, with an additional option for audio description (AD) in English.” I’ll probably be taking advantage of this re-screening, as it will be 3am for me when the film premieres this evening.

Will you be watching tonight? Feel free to share your review with us in the comments.

Update January 28, 2011, The morning after the premiere.
Here is my review of the film.

I felt about as happy as this smiley goat (one of the film’s minor stars) after I saw the premiere of Life In A Daystreamed live last night on YouTube. And I think it’s important to note that I had to wake up at 3 in the morning in order to watch the premiere live from Israel, which was not an easy or pleasant feat. However, as the credits rolled one hour and thirty-four minutes after the film began, I can safely say that I have never been so happy that I dragged myself out of bed during prime sleeping hours. The film is incredible.

As you know, Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald reached out to the YouTube community last summer and asked them to shoot video of a day in their lives on July 24, 2010 and upload it to YouTube. They received some 80,000 submissions–around 4,500 hours of footage–and nobody, even the producers and directors themsleves, knew how it was going to turn out. It was a risk; and a risk well taken.

The fact that the participants, for the most part, shot this footage on their own, with their families or with close friends or a single filmmaker that they trusted made for some of the purest emotion I’ve ever seen on the screen. I laughed out loud, smiled even bigger than that silly goat in the picture above, held back tears, and felt my heart swell with happiness or empathy for the contributers.

The film is edited into a series of themes montages or vignettes that illustrated everything from waking up to eating breakfast, birth, death, love, fears, transportation, sadness, happiness and everything in between. What struck me most is that it shows that people from all over the world, from all different cultures and walks of life, aren’t really so different. When asked to share what they fear the most, most people from around the globe spoke about the same things. When asked to share what they love the most the responses were similar as well. We’re all not that different from each other at all.

If you got a chance to see it last night, let me know what you thought in the comments. If not, I definitely recommend that you head out to see it in the theater when it returns on July 24, 2011.

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